It's book launch day!
My wife and I love soccer. We love watching it, we've both loved playing it in the past, and for the last few years we've been pretty obsessed with women's soccer. The women's game doesn't have the same kind of diving and fake injuries and bench-clearing brawls that ultimately slows the men's game down so much. Women's pro soccer is basically 90min of the purest form of soccer.
At the start of the 2024 season, we realized after 8 years of being season ticket holders for the Portland Thorns in the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), we'd occasionally been to several other stadiums and it wasn't an outlandish to think it was possible for us to hit all 14 different NWSL soccer stadiums in a single season, then write up our experiences.
I love to travel and enjoy travel writing so I ran with the idea of taking this on as a project. We'd travel, document, and later review all the stadiums in the NWSL and compile it into a book for fans of the sport. In the end, it's a couple hundred pages and about 2-3 hours of reading that we wrote it in a casual, blog-like style, but it's loaded with specific tips and advice for every stadium and city.
Our guidebook to all 14 National Women's Soccer League stadiums for 2024-2025 is available for purchase and instant download from the following ebook stores:
You may also find it from other ebook sellers if you search for the ISBN which is 9798992253207.
Who goes to away games?
About a dozen years ago, I stayed in a hotel for a bike race in Seattle (saving a four hour drive before and after my race) and when I went downstairs one morning to head out, the elevator was packed with people wearing red from head to toe speaking with unfamiliar accents. Then I saw the lobby, which was filled with 100 people wearing Cornhuskers gear. Turns out the University of Nebraska was playing the University of Washington that same morning and they were fans who flew in from the midwest.
I had never heard of this before and had no idea that there are hundreds of sports fans so into their sport that they fly to away games and make weekend trips out of it. But it sounds like a fun way to experience a quick vacation in a new city while seeing your favorite team play at the same time.
Over years of following soccer, we had the opportunity when we were in San Diego to see family, or in Florida catching up with friends to take a break and go watch a match featuring our favorite Portland team while they were out on the road, and we had a blast each time.
The thing is though, it can be expensive, and a slightly risky thing to do. You fly somewhere, have to find a hotel, figure out what to do in the city, then also you have to blindly grab tickets in a stadium you've never been to.
There's a chance you could do all that and then accidentally buy the worst tickets imaginable or stay in a crappy hotel and have a miserable time at your game. We experienced this ourselves before, once in Los Angeles, when I wasn't paying close enough attention to the ticket site and we bought seats in full sun during a heat wave while three-quarters of the stadium sat under giant shade tarps that extend from the top of the stadium, comfortable as hell, while we baked.
Women's sports are definitely having a moment
Over the years we've watched the NWSL go from a tiny, struggling operation where players changed into uniforms inside their cars in the parking lot while playing on college practice fields all the way to today, where it's a billion-dollar sports industry with $100M+ stadiums that sell out every week. Where top players have gone from making a couple grand a month while keeping a day job to getting paid nearly a million per year.
Last year, the NWSL sold over two million tickets to their games and continued to broadcast all matches weekly for every team. After a couple years of watching all the games ourselves, we figured we could make a nice little travel guide with suggestions and advice about each stadium in the league, for rabid fans of the sport.
So that's what we did. Over the course of about three months of 2024 we spent a day in every stadium, took copious notes on what our experiences were like, the highlights and the lows, and afterwards, we wrote quick guides to each host city, offering ideas on things to do, places to stay, and how to get to games. I also took about a thousand photographs during the nationwide tour and asked local friends to suggest itineraries for people new to each city.
If you know any women's soccer fans in your life, it's a great gift and if you follow the NWSL yourself, it's a guide to how you can enjoy any one of the other cities and stadiums when your favorite team plays others on the road.
It was entirely self-published, and we use Ingram as our distributor to get it into ebook stores around the globe. Unfortunately, they only give us sales data after a month-long delay, so we have no idea how well it is selling at the moment, but it did show up briefly as the #1 new book in Soccer at Amazon.
We've already pushed out a couple revisions and there will be at least another one going out to ebook purchasers soon. Our next step is finalizing a separate print version with a full-color custom layout for all our photos, but given the work of test prints and tweaking it'll probably be another month before it's ready for sale.
If this project turns into something that can at least break even for the travel costs, we'll likely tackle our other favorite sports someday, and visit every WNBA arena and every MLB stadium to write guidebooks for those as well.
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